In a recent tournament, there were nine players in round 1. Thus, the lowest rated player received a full point bye. After round 1, one more player joined the tournament with an half point bye for round 1. Thus, there were an even ten players for round 2. The natural pairings resulted in pairing the player with the full point bye with the player with the half point bye. Since neither player played in round 1, they have no color history or no due color. Should I toss a coin to decide what colors they should receive in round 2?
Hypothetically, I can see that in an even larger section there might be even more players with half point byes going into round 2. Let’s say that eight of these players are paired with each other in the 0.5 score group. None of them played in round 1, so they have no due color for round 2. Should I do a coin toss in a fashion similar to round 1 to assign colors? In other words, if the coin toss was high assign white to the higher rated player in the first pairing and then black to the higher rated player in the second pairing and so forth. Alternately, I could do individual coin tosses to assign the colors for each individual pairing.
I couldn’t find any mention in the USCF rulebook that directly addresses this issue. Please note that this is different than the situation in which both players are due the same color. There is no color conflict after round 1, so then the rules resolving a color conflict do not apply.
This happens all the time at our clubs down here that do “one game per week” tournaments, due to the sheer quantity of people miss a week here or there. We end up with plenty of players with half point byes playing each other in the second round. The TD’s usually use computers to do the pairings, but I have no idea what criteria the programs use to determine who gets which colors. So I can’t help, but I just wanted to mention that this does come up fairly frequently.
Yes, when both players have no color history, the correct method is to assign color randomly. (On the other hand, players with no color history are valuable for making transpositions to correct color allocation problems.) I would probably do a coin toss for each such pairing unless the entire 0.5 score group had no color history. On the other hand, one could make a perfectly valid argument that tossing a coin once and then alternating colors whenever two such players are paired is sufficiently random and less cumbersome.
Thanks Ken! I agree. This appears to be the correct method to use by analogy. However, my actual question is where is this method explained in the USCF rulebook? Shouldn’t this be addressed somewhere in the rulebook since it is a circumstance that occurs fairly often in round 2?
Yep, we see this a lot at our club. Two or more players enter for round two with a retroactive half-point bye. We have them toss for colors if they are paired. (If there is an odd number of one-pointers that does not always happen.)
We used to sometimes use the variation that a high-rated (for our club) player who entered in round two with a first-round bye would be paired as though he had a full point, but one of our members objected to that rather strongly. That’s something to bear in mind, anyway.
I’ve only once given a retroactive round one bye to a high-rated player starting in round two in a one game per week event. He did have pretty good excuse for missing in that his wife gave birth to their first child the day of round one.
That’s a good excuse…I mean that the relatively high-rated player is paired as though he had one point; he still gets only a half-point bye in the standings. That option is in the rulebook—somewhere. One of our regulars did not like it, so we stopped doing it.
I never understood how the old Delegates/Busypersons Schedule of graduated byes based on rating—with more than half-point per round for Masters—was legal. Since it was used at the US Open it must have been OK. I guess…
29E3a “A player who has played no games is due neither white nor black.”
Therefore this player can be assigned either color.
IF the player is assigned a game against another player who is not due either color then 29e2 applies which calls for random assignment.
Random assignment is frequently today done by a setting in the pairing program. FIDE rules clearly call for a drawing of colors. Under 29e2 one could draw, or use the random assignment of color fromt he beginning of the tournament and apply the random color to the higher rated player as was done for round 1. That precludes having another drawing for color.
The rule book cannot explain every situation. One has to learn how to apply a series of rules in a logical manner. That can lead to different opinions and, frankly, multiple “correct” answers in cases. The art of the TD is to select the best of good solutions.
Back in BC (before computers) if I had 2 players with byes facing each other in the second round I would base the color assignment on first round results. Which ever color had won the majority of the first round games in that section I would assign the lower rated player with the bye that color. My logic was that if I could even the results by color I would have less possibility later in the tournament of players having an imbalance of colors. This would only apply if I had one game between players with no color history. If I had more, in each additional game the higher rated would have the alternating color. I knew it wasn’t random color assignment but it was a way to reduce the possibility of getting a complaint about being assigned black too many times in later rounds. I should add that second round pairings with no color history didn’t happen very often as there were usually a few with played draws in the score group too. I don’t recall ever receiving a complaint about how I assigned colors in this situation.
Today with computer pairings if I have 2 players arriving late (after pairings are done) to enter for the first round I base color assignments on giving the higher rated player the opposite color of the lowest board’s higher rated player and then manually adding it to the computer’s pairings while the games are in progress.
One could even take it a step further, and assign colors in the first such game so as to be opposite to the last pairing made in round 1.
For example, if the higher-rated player on the last board in round 1 had white, you could give the higher-rated player black in the first round 2 game where neither player has a color history.
